Daina Harrison

I’ve decided to start my own Book of Delights. Ross Gay and his Book of Delights made the rounds on virtually every podcast I listened to a year or two ago. The author had challenged himself to write a short essay about something he found delightful, every day, for an entire year. Even my therapist recommended it. I expected Book of Delights to be sweet and funny and probably a piece of media I wouldn’t read to the end. When I finally picked up the book, it floored me. Every piece had me laughing while simultaneously reflecting on my own death, and the people I’ve lost or lost touch with. I found myself wondering, really, what they’d been doing out there in the world in the years since we’d spoken. And wondering what my parents and friends were like as toddlers, and noticing how absurdly funny my dog is, and reminding myself that someday I’ll miss them all terribly. 

So I’m challenging myself to write a short piece about something that delighted me at the end of every day. I’m going to build the platform for this project using Webflow, which is a program I really want to get familiar with. Posts will include accompanying sketches and photos as often as possible. This may turn into something that looks and feels good enough to link to on my personal website or portfolio, but it might be just for me. Even if that’s the case, it’s a project that will help me hone some much-needed web and design skills, as well as reminding me to check in on my loved ones and talk to strangers and seek novelty on a daily basis, which are all things that feed my creativity and which I’m feeling the lack of lately. 

I have not included a moodboard per se because all the blogs I looked at were garbage as far as design goes, but I’ve included an excerpt from the book itself.

Personal project brainstorm

What’s missing from my life/ what I want more of:

• Community, connectedness, sisterhood
• Time outside 
• Inspiration to some degree 
• Service 
• art – making things just for the sake of making 
• Writing (and reading)
• Strenuous exercise 
• NOVELTY

Projects/ pursuits that might check some of these boxes:

• Join a community garden 
• Volunteer 
• Start a running group 
• Start a walking group? lol 
• Build a personal website
• Start a blog (a non-school-related blog, no offense)
• Join a weekly painting class 
• Start a Book of Delights- ala Ross Gay 
• Make prints as personalized, no-occasion cards for my friends and loved ones on a regular basis
• Take a ceramics class 
• Start or find an art critique group

I’ve chosen my business card. This was the most recent project for Jill’s typography class, and is the first piece I’ve made in the program where I can start to see what I’ve absorbed in the curriculum so far coming together.

The Brief: to create a business card for myself, including these details: name, location, and a way to contact; and three interests. We were then to make an initial mark, using design to play on at least one of our listed interests. I listed art, design, and seagulls, which I recognize is a bit silly, but I didn’t want to take the assignment of presenting myself to the world too seriously. I think design and art should, or at least can, be fun and playful. I also just resonate with seagulls. They’re impulsive, raucous and occasionally not what anyone’s in the mood for. I feel that.

The Approach: I started  by sketching iterations of seagulls before combining this element with typography. My intention was to take a look at all the different forms and ideas the image of a seagull can suggest. In flight, their bodies make a beautiful sort of arc with points and curves. I think to a degree this image conveys freedom, or a wistfulness for it- and also, having grown up here and spent a lot of time on the coast- there’s a 70’s beach cabin vibe that I love. On the ground, they can be pretty, or aggressive, or comical. 

After that I started playing with my initials. I settled on using just the letter D after a few sketches, but was able to include the H in my final iteration. The first 15 sketches or so were very literal- I’m quickly learning the benefit of keeping a distance from my ideas until I’ve gotten enough of them out of my head. Eventually I came to some iterations that I felt suggested the idea rather than stating it.

The result: On the front, the letter D, with the top line of the bowl looping behind the stem, through the counter and back into the bowl, ending in the shape of a set of wide wings in flight- this crossover also creates the shape of an H, sharing the left stem with the D. On the back: using the two colors I’d chosen, red and pink- a rectangle with a pink circle enclosed near the top. I was thinking of the sun over water when I made this, and wanted to add a bit more detail- but everything I tried to add felt crowded, so I kept it simple. 

I feel satisfied with the results. I can’t remember which teacher- maybe Jill- said that work is never done, it’s only due. I’ll probably continue to work on the back image until it feels in stronger synchronicity with the gridded lines and flowing shapes included in the information on the front. But overall, I consider this piece to be a success.

Game: The Sriracha Game 

Players: 2-4

Target Audience: potential Sriracha consumers lol 

    And families with young(ish) children

The rules are simple: the deck is split evenly between players, face down. The person who loves sriracha the most (eye roll) goes first, placing a card face up on the table. The cards are either a food item (tacos, burgers, eggs, etc) or a sriracha card: sriracha cards have anywhere between 1 and 4 bottles on them. Moving quickly in a circle, players place cards in a pile in the middle, until either a pair or sandwich (a pair with an unmatching card in the middle) is achieved, at which point whoever slaps the pile first claims the cards- Or until a sriracha card is drawn. When a player puts down a sriracha card, the next player has to add cards to the pile in accordance with the number of bottles on the sriracha card- OR until they either play a pair, sandwich, or another sriracha card. If a player accidentally slaps a sriracha card, they have to give up two of their own cards. Whoever gets all the cards first wins. 

I probably won’t play this game a second time. The illustrations on the cards are adorable (very similar style to Sushi Go), but the whole thing just feels like a money-grab from Sriracha. I think I read the word ‘Sriracha’ like 400 times in the twenty minutes we played. It might be a little more dynamic with more than two players but I doubt we’ll pull it out again. I have a short attention span and generally love high-speed low-stakes games like this one, but there just wasn’t enough going on in the game to make it fun for more than a round. Or maybe we just bought a children’s game on accident.

Tools I currently have:

-Drawing 

-Patience

-Teaching- I ran the training and education program for at my previous job

-Management 

Tools I have that need development:

-Illustrator

-Figma

-Webflow

-Communication- I’ve struggled with group projects because I either promise to do something I don’t know how to do, or volunteer to do something I don’t have time for

-Organization

Tools I need:

-Photoshop

-Asking for help- growing up with undiagnosed ADHD, my biggest take-away from school was that at all costs I needed to pretend that I knew what was happening when I didn’t. I made up for lost time later but when I started the second grade, I didn’t know how to read. It took the entire first semester for even my parents to figure out that this was the case. My mission at the time was to keep anyone from knowing that I was struggling, because I thought it must be an internal failure. I eventually did learn to read (or did i?) but I don’t know if I ever fully outgrew the compulsion to pretend that I was learning at a normal pace alongside my peers. 

-everything?

This was my first time using AI image generation and I loved it. I didn’t get anything close to the image I had in mind when I started but that was what delighted me so much about it. It was like telling a four year old (with infinite skill) to draw what they thought my idea looked like. I chose the prompt, pet-friendly interstellar vacation. I wanted an astronaut and pet dog floating above the sun- the astronaut would be roasting a hot dog by the heat of the sun and the dog would be eagerly looking on. I realize this is a totally unsafe situation but a girl can dream.

My first prompt was “photo of an astronaut in space roasting a hot dog over the sun, with her pet dog who is also in a space suit,” which generated these results:

I tried to correct by adding more emphasis on the human in the picture with “photo of an astronaut and pet dog in space, dog and human wearing space suits, human roasting a hot dog over the sun:”

Gencraft didn’t seem to want to put two space suits in the picture (I found myself anthropomorphizing this product a lot) so I tried adding a bit more action to each character. My last, still unsuccessful prompt, was “photo of an astronautic a space suit roasting a hot dog over the sun pet dog in a space suit wants the hot dog.”

After three failed attempts I decided to try the Enhance Prompt option just to see what would happen, which changed the prompt to “A playful (((human astronaut in a sleek space suit))), with a (((hotdog roasting on a stick))) above the (((Sun))), with a (((curious pet dog in a miniature space suit))) eagerly looking on and wanting a bite.” While it didn’t deliver my desired results, I definitely got my favorite image from this one:

My experience is limited but I like Gencraft and will probably end up paying the $10 for a monthly subscription. I tried a couple others out before deciding to use Gencraft for this assignment and found it to be intuitive to use. It yielded, if not accurate results, generally realistic images. The Enhance Prompt option may still need work but in the mean time it may serve users like me by providing an idea of the kinds of keywords we should be inputting to fine-tune our results.

Note: something I hadn’t expected was, as I said earlier, how much I found myself anthropomorphizing. I don’t know how to describe it exactly, I don’t have the same reaction to AI chatbots. Asking it to generate something from my own thoughts and then seeing what it came up with felt like a game, and the responses, because they were so strange, felt playful and a little childish. My friend has a parakeet that, in playful moods, will whistle your tune back at you if you sing to it, sometimes adding a spontaneous addition at the end. It felt like that: like an interspecies- not communication- but interaction. For the record, I fully understand that this isn’t communication of any kind- but I’m sure I’m not the first person to have this experience. It’s a wild time to be alive.

I loved Gabriel Lopez’s talk. I’ve been struggling with this idea that I shouldn’t be influenced by anything, if that makes sense. Like my ideas weren’t original unless they were born on the spot, with no parentage. He told a story- many stories- that were directly oppositional to this idea.

My mother is Lithuanian. She was born in a refugee in Germany, after her parents fled Soviet occupation. My father knows and speaks little about his vaguely European background- he’s just “American”. But Lithuanians have tended to seek each other out, maybe because their culture was under siege for so long back home. I grew up in the Lithuanian community here in Seattle, which is incredibly close-knit. It has always been a huge part of my identity. For various reasons I’ve distanced myself from it in recent years but, like family, I’ll never be someone wholly outside of it.

Though my experience must have been easier, because I’m white- when Gabriel talked about not fully having a grounding in either his American or Mexican heritage, I understood exactly what he meant. I understand Lithuanian fairly well, but I don’t speak it fluently. With friends and cousins, I always felt ashamed of how American our house felt, and that we generally spoke English at home. At the same time, I spent so much of my childhood and teen years trying to hide my mother’s foreign-ness. I felt that we were dirty, that we ate the wrong foods, didn’t quite fit in. I remember trying to explain to my grandmother that I only wanted black bread and smoked fish at home, and not in my packed lunches. The first time I visited Lithuania I was six years old, and I continued to go back with my mother and sister every few years. But the first time I went as an adult, without any family to accompany or translate, I felt confused about what I was experiencing, and what I had expected it to be. I was twenty-four and spent a summer doing a language and culture program at the University in Vilnius. It was the first time I’d seen the country through my own eyes and not my mother’s. I think I was surprised to find that it had continued to evolve after the Soviet Union collapsed. It was strange to realize how incorrect my ideas were of this place I’d felt so connected to. I had expected it to feel like home, and it didn’t. 

I still love it there. I love the food, I love my family, I love how flat and wet and green it is there. I love the superstitions I adhere to but don’t believe (insider tip: never whistle indoors- it summons the devil). I love the traditional art of the Baltics and Eastern Europe, the paper cutting and painting on eggshells with hot wax. These art forms are passed down from generation to generation, and it feels important to continue them, even if I’m not sure I’ll have my own children. I grew up reading and visually consuming bits of Lithuanian media, like children’s books, that had been carried over to America by my family during Soviet occupation and were completely outdated. They’re burned into my brain, as well as the soviet architecture that has outlasted its creators. I don’t think anyone who lives there could love it, but I do. I’ve come to identify not as Lithuanian, or strictly American. Whether I want it to or not, this has hugely influenced the work I make now and will make going forward. I will never be one thing or the other. 

I was so grateful to be reminded that this all makes for a pretty unique point of reference. The American immigrant experience is certainly not singular to me- but being first-generation is a creative gift. We are gifted a world crystalized in the memories of our parents and grandparents, and another one that we inhabit in space in time, but can look at from the outside. 

Here she is, the letter U in all her green glory. I took my dog for a walk to find a “U” out in the world and then realized I’d taken it with me.

I chose to look at job postings in three cities: Rome, Vilnius (Lithuania) and Amsterdam. One of the many reasons I decided to attend this program was that I wanted to eventually have a job that could take me to other countries. My husband and I have been talking seriously about moving to Italy in the next five years, and we’re looking at a small town called Ostia, just outside Rome. There’s good surfing there year-round and it’s a short train ride into the city.

My mother’s family is from Lithuania and I’ve spent many summer there; Vilnius has a very special place in my heart, and I’ve always wanted to spend enough time there to become fluent in Lithuanian.

I’ve only visited Amsterdam once but it was the most fun four days of my life. I loved how vibrancy, noise and night life are juxtaposed with the quaintness and quietude of the canals and gardens. There seemed to be something to do in every mood.

None of the cities I searched for had salary listings for the jobs posted, but I searched for average graphic designer salaries on Glassdoor to kind of fill in some blanks. I haven’t decided what field I want to go into so I searched for “designer” jobs as a catch-all.

I was very surprised to learn that Amsterdam might be my best bet when taking into account the cost of living with the average pay. I’m not at all surprised that jobs in Lithuania pay the least, but I had really thought that it would still be relative to the low cost of living there. But it just isn’t.

Amsterdam, here I come!

I did some quick googling before deciding how to log my time and read that Clockify was the favorite for 2023. There’s a desktop version but it wasn’t as easy to navigate as the browser version, so that’s what I used this week.

I wasn’t necessarily surprised at how much time it took me to complete my assignments this, but I’m definitely dwelling on how I will bill my time post-school. I have ADHD and generally things just take me longer than I think they take most people.

I realized this week (not for the first time) that one of my biggest challenges is breaking projects down into smaller tasks. I lose a lot of time “working” on things without conceptualizing what it is I’m working towards. When I do this, it’s easy to get side-tracked. I will be logging my time from now on, with the intention of gaining a level of practicality about how much time I need to set aside for projects, as well as hopefully shaving off some of the lost time that’s inherent with neurodivergence. My mantra about my own neurodivergence is something akin to, all of my structures need to be external.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1N2G0MvCLIb9KQCX418vf9K-baXw6iWLz/view?usp=sharing

Our final assignment for the AR segment was a group project: the objective was to choose a theme, and individually build a set of virtual panels using Eyejack . I partnered with Jenny Katz and Jordan Sanchez and the theme we chose was ‘mom and pop restaurants.’ We decided that we would each choose a restaurant in our neighborhood and do a deep dive on that spot. I picked Bizzarro Italian Cafe, in Wallingford, and had a great time expounding on a place that is very near to my heart. It was a great choice for a project like this because the panel set-up feels like a museum display, and small restaurants like the ones we chose have so much history.

On reflection of my first New Media module- I’ll using Eyejack obnoxiously for the foreseeable future. It’s a delight.